40 Desserts That Can Kill You

06.07.10 6:48 AM ET

Health advocates pushing for low calorie options, smaller portions and local ingredients at restaurants usually focus on the core part of the meal. After all, the pizza, the pasta, the salad, the chicken, the fish and every other entrée rich in savory and salty flavors typically comprise the bulk of a meal’s calories are consumed. Escaping such scrutiny: the gut-busting dessert. High in calories and high in saturated fat, the wrong dessert choice can turn a not-so-bad for-you dinner into a no-holds-barred calorie smackdown.

Click Image To View Our Gallery Of The 40 Desserts With The Most Calories

The Daily Beast measured the highest-calorie desserts from fast food and chain restaurants against one another to determine the most indulgent, unhealthy—and someday, possibly deadly—options for satisfying that sweet tooth. We ran the nutritional value numbers of dessert offerings from 21 of America’s most popular sit-down and drive-thru restaurants, across the four categories available for each eatery: calories, saturated fat, sodium, and carbohydrates. Each dessert was ranked within each nutritional category, then the ranking each dessert received for each nutritional category was totaled to determine the final ranking. To achieve a breadth of restaurants, each chain was limited to three items on this list. (Milkshakes were eliminated from consideration because they are not, strictly speaking, just for dessert.)

The desserts in this study range from ice cream sundaes atop brownies, to bourbon pecan pie, to cinnamon sticks with white icing dipping sauce. The worst-for-you desserts come from chain restaurants, which tend to focus on providing a complete dining experience and have larger, more complex desserts. Some final food for thought: the number one most-decadent dessert has more calories and saturated fat than the Wendy’s Baconator Triple, which previously topped our list of the
41 Deadliest Fast-Food Meals.